THE GALL OF THE YOKE
“The public be damned!” snarled a successful capitalist some forty or
more years ago, a capitalist who himself had been one of the public.
For by the public he meant working people and all who are forced to
travel with them. Other capitalists and near-capitalists, imagining that
his expression was a formula in some way responsible for his ability to
get money from the very class he cursed, adopted it as their business
slogan.
As a slogan it enjoyed a long life. It even went into our politics.
There are persons who claim that it was for the purpose of changing that
habit of thought that Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party.
Be that as it may, the working people, having changed it somewhat,
adopted it for their own use.
“Capital be damned!” shouted the working people, and like the author of
the slogan they forgot that they cursed the very thing that put bread
and butter into their dinner-pails.
That was the condition when I entered the underbrush that November
morning way back in 1916. The four most eventful years in the history of
this world have passed since then. In no field has the change been so
great as with the working people, working men and working women.
When I stepped out of the underbrush, during the last few months of my
work and life in the tenements, that slogan had been scrapped, thrown
into a waste-basket and forgotten.
“We must have our share” had taken its place with the working man and
the working woman. “We will have our share.”
“There ain’t no use of ’em telling us to look at Russia,” a boss
carpenter told me about three months before I left New York City. “We
are looking at Russia, looking at it close and constant. That’s the
reason we workers in the United States is bound to win out. We see the
mistakes made in Russia, and we’re going to avoid them.”
I glanced at his wife and saw that she was nodding her head in silent
approval. Standing over the roasting-hot cook-stove she was serving her
man and their five children their lunch, after having placed a plate for
herself in compliment to a woman visitor. That visitor chanced to be
myself, an inspector of dog licenses.
During the war, when good food was so hard to get in even high-priced
restaurants, I formed the habit of taking my own lunch. In a little
while I realized that this habit had another value besides that of
insuring me pure, cleanly prepared food—it enabled me to accept
invitations to meals with tenement-dwellers without embarrassment to
them or myself.
The day to which I refer on entering their flat I found the family in
the act of sitting down to their midday meal. This was not my first meal
with the mother and school-children, though it was with the father of
the family. Being at work on a building near his home he had come in to
lunch.
“Do you think wages can remain at their present level?” I questioned.
He shook his head—his mouth being filled for the time being by boiled
potato and roast beef.
“And I ain’t saying that we wanter keep ’em as high as they are,” he
added, as soon as he could speak. “Things can’t go down as long as wages
are as high as they are. We wants things to go down. It’s ridicklus the
prices we has to pay for the things we eat and wear when we’re not at
war. Food and clothes oughter be plentiful and cheap, but that don’t
mean that wages has got to be what they was before the war.”
“What does it mean?” I asked, and I realized that not only the mother
but every one of the five children were listening.
“It means that we’ve got to have our share, that’s what it means.”
Though his words were emphatic he was not the least bit rude, for my
being a wage-earner insured my sympathy with his point of view. “I’m
tired seeing my missus skimp and slave, and not have a second frock to
her back, nor a second pair of shoes, like she done before the war.
She’s got glad rags now, not so many of ’em, but I’m going to see that
she gets more. Well, she can’t get more if the builder and contractor
pockets all the profits while we workers hardly gets our salt.”
“It ain’t that so much—my having Sunday clothes,” the mother put in, as,
having helped herself to a boiled potato and gravy she took her seat.
“It’s the children. They’re growing up and I wants they should have good
food and a chance to get through school before they goes to work.”
“Through high school, mum,” the eldest girl corrected. “I want to be a
teacher.”
Another time I lunched with a family of which the father was a plumber
and at table. It is an unusual occurrence, or was at that time, to find
the man of the house at home in the middle of the day, except on
Saturdays and Sundays.
“Yes, wages is coming down some, and I’m willing they should,” he told
me, looking over the rim of his saucer, from which he was drinking
steaming-hot coffee. “What I ain’t willing is they should cut from the
bottom more than from the top. There ain’t no sense in my boss paying me
two dollars for doing work on which he collects twenty or more from a
house-owner. ’Tain’t a fair division, and none of us is going to stand
for it.”
Again the education of their children came up. There were four sons, and
the eldest was attending the Stuyvesant High School with the intention
of becoming an engineer. The mother explained that she was loath to
allow the boy to enter for this additional training when he might have
had his working papers and gotten a good job.
“What’s the use of us working if we can’t get better for our children
than we had ourselves?” the husband cut in on her plaintive fears. “I
always wanted to do something,” he explained to me. “I wanted to build
houses. I’d got a bit handy with a saw and a hammer; they was all the
tools I could borrow, when my father lost his job and I had to go to
work. I had to take the best thing I could get—helper to a sort of
half-way plumber. For a long time I used to think I’d change, but the
chance never come my way. I’m bound my boy shall, though.”
“We’re for a minimum wage if they’ll make it high enough and cut the
maximum low enough,” a young Jewess, an operator in a shirt-waist
factory, told me one evening when chance brought us together in
adjoining seats in the top gallery of a Broadway theatre.
“What do you mean by cutting the maximum low enough?” I questioned.
“The manager of our plant gets twenty-five thousand a year; I make
around twenty-five a week, piece-work, you know; but some of the girls
don’t get above twenty—can’t get up to my speed,” she explained.
“T’other day the assistant manager let out a hint that wages was to be
cut. ‘All right,’ I tells ’im, ‘cut, but begin where they begin to trim
a tree—on the top. Just clip off a hundred a week from the manager,
shave off fifty of yours, twenty-five of your assistants, and then I’ll
let you take one off me.’”
“What did he say to that?” I asked, hoping that some hitch would occur
to prevent the curtain from rising on time.
“Oh, he’s a snitcher. He was getting something to carry his
chief—feeling our pulse,” she smiled back at me.
“You gave him something.”
“Sure. I gave him an earful. Next week we’re going to have a meeting at
the house of the girl who lives nearest the shop. When the cut comes
we’ll be ready for them.”
As the curtain went up I reached across and grasped her hand.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Maybe we’ll meet at another show and I’ll
tell you about our fight.”
The 1st of October, 1920, I gave up my position with the A. S. P. C. A.
and applied for work in the Store Beautiful. This is reputed to be the
largest and most beautiful department store in the world. I had been
told that its employees came nearer receiving a square deal than in any
other large shop in New York City.
As I had begun my four years in the underbrush by working in one
department store, of which I have never been able to speak a good word,
it seemed to me only fair that I should try another. Not being an
investigator I wanted to make as good a report of conditions as I
truthfully could.
I can truthfully say that conditions in the Store Beautiful are far, far
ahead of what I had seen and known in the store where my experience
began. Instead of one dollar a day I received seventeen a week, which,
so far as I could find out, was at that time the minimum wage for a
saleswoman.
The one and only fault that I have to find with Store Beautiful was put
into words by one of the best and most highly esteemed salesman in the
department with me. He had held his position for considerably more than
ten years, and had many customers who would allow no one else to wait on
them.
“They’re pressing us pretty hard,” this man remarked, after reading a
notice passed around among the salespeople of the department, telling
them to report at a certain corner of the department after the store
closed.
“What do you mean?” asked the floor-walker who had handed him the paper.
“I mean that they shouldn’t ask us to remain after hours—give our time
free—when if we ask to get off early they charge us for it. This is the
third time this week they’ve kept us. Our time’s worth something to us;
these girls want to go home. I want to go; you want to go. They mustn’t
press us too hard.”
During my six weeks’ service as a saleswoman in the toy department of
the Store Beautiful I had some business to attend to, and asked to get
off. My request was granted none too graciously. When my pay-envelope
came I found that I had been docked one dollar and seventy-three cents.
That was all right; I expected to pay for the time spent on my own
business.
A week or so later the department was turned upside down, getting ready
for the Christmas opening. Everybody came early and worked hard all day.
When closing time came there was so much to be done that an appeal was
made to the salespeople by the floor-walkers—they urged us to stay and
help get our counters in order.
I remained until nearly midnight, and not having time to go to my little
tenement flat, I was forced to get what supper I could in a Third Avenue
eating-place. It was not much of a supper, but it cost me eighty cents.
Counting up my time I found that I had remained, helped in the
department, just exactly the length of time I had taken off. Naturally I
expected to receive at least as much for my time as the management had
docked from my wages—my work was done at night and the time taken from
them was in the morning, when salespeople are least busy.
Seventy-five cents is what I received. Their time was worth one dollar
and seventy-three cents, mine seventy-five cents. Now that, as I see it,
is the crux of the fight between labor and capital to-day. Capital wants
so much more for itself, its own time, than it is willing to give labor
for its time. Labor is sick and tired of that arrangement.
Next to the condition itself, the injustice of it, the chiefest reason
for our social unrest to-day is Prohibition.
So long as workers could stupefy their senses with liquor there was a
chance of staving off the day of reckoning with capital indefinitely.
Liquor not only robbed the worker of his mental power and his will to
do, but it consumed his earnings and left him too poor to fight to a
finish. Liquor caused more strikers to throw up the sponge than all
other reasons put together.
This is not an entirely original idea with me. I received the germ of
the thought from one of four prostitutes at whose table I once ate my
lunch. These young women were all Poles, immigrants who had come in soon
after the end of the World War. They all spoke English sufficiently to
be easily understood. If I could approach their accent I would try to
give _verbatim_ a part of my conversation with them. Unhappily that is
beyond my power.
When I asked how they liked this country the prettiest of the four shook
her head, the tallest one made a face, the shortest looked indifferent,
and the stout one replied. She assured me that had they known that
Prohibition would so soon become a law they would never have come to the
United States. That was the reason they had left Russia. The Russians,
most of them, had stopped drinking because they couldn’t get liquor.
It was then that the tall girl vouchsafed that the Czar should have
known better than to have stopped his soldiers drinking. He should have
known, she insisted, that so soon as the people got sober enough to
think they would kill him and put an end to their oppressors.
“It’ll be just as bad over here in America,” she added. “If working
people don’t have liquor to keep them half-soaked they blow things up.”
Months before this conversation took place Miss Stafford had asked me
what, if anything, could be done to stop the social unrest in our
country.
“Why, yes, as I see it it might be done,” I replied. “Burn all the
public libraries and turn the country over to the Catholic Church.”
Miss Stafford, being a Catholic, I knew this reply would tease her,
cause her to dispute my assertion. Defending myself I felt sure we would
hit on a more interesting subject of conversation. Furthermore, I knew
that though she had been earning her living for years, practically ever
since she reached maturity, she belonged to a class that steadily
refuses to consider themselves as working people, a class that always
takes side with capital.
For work has become so disgraceful in our country that no woman with any
claims to being gently born cares to be classed with working people.
That is one reason why there are so many childless married women, and
discontented women, married and single. Nine cases out of ten the one
and only aim of a girl is to marry as soon as possible—be she working
girl or human cootie. And nine cases out of ten instead of trying to fit
herself for intelligent wifehood and motherhood she only aims at
catching a husband, a good husband if she can get him, but a husband she
must have.
This eagerness to secure a provider is not caused primarily by laziness,
but to remove the stigma of working for their living. Most women who do
not marry have to work for a living. Working for her living in our
country puts a woman on a lower plane.
An amusing evidence of this difference came to my attention while I was
doing social service work. At committee meetings, when the members of
various committees met to hear the reports of the social workers on the
staff of the Bellevue social service department, the workers used to sit
on one side of a long table and the committee members on the other.
Under no circumstances must a worker attend one of these meetings with
her hat on—only the members of the committee wore hats.
At one of these meetings when reporting a case I happened to refer to
the committee as “you women.” The expression of consternation that
sprang into the face of the individual obsessed by the possibilities of
Hog Island! Realizing my mistake, I made a little bow, including all the
members of the committee, and corrected myself by saying “you ladies.”
How the Hog Island “lady” beamed on me!
“My dear madam, if the good God made a lady he forgot to mention it,”
was on the tip of my tongue. What might have happened had I put that
statement into words is a matter of speculation, though I have always
felt quite sure that I would not have kept that job another two months.
Yet those social workers were a picked group of women; every one refined
and well-appearing; all of them women of unblemished character, as well
educated as a majority of the women on the other side of the table, and
with a few exceptions all graduated nurses. Because they worked for
their living the committee members objected to being so much as
mentioned in the same class—women.
“I don’t know but what I should marry,” the woman who loved much said to
me one day. I was sitting on her door-sill in the Thirty-second Street
tenement, with my feet on her little piazza. “My sister keeps after me
to.” She paused; as I could not see her face I waited. “She never told
me, but I know she don’t like having me at her house so much—not when
she has company. She says it shames her, having folks find out that
she’s got a sister working.”
“Has she offered to support you?” I asked.
“Oh, no! She ain’t able to do that. Her husband’s well off, but not rich
enough to help me much even if I’d let her. She thinks I should marry.”
“How about the man?” I asked, trying to make my tone flippant, though I
was far from feeling so. “Have you got one in sight?”
“Oh, yes.” Her tone was a picture of dejection. After a pause she added,
almost spitefully: “He riles me so. Every time he comes here I want to
jump out the winder.” Another pause. Then pensively: “He’s a good man,
though. ’Tain’t his fault I don’t fancy having him around. He’s sober,
never touches a drop, polite spoken, comes of a good family, and makes
money. His wages are grand—eighty-two a week.”
Still I held my peace though I knew that she was waiting for me to
speak.
“I ain’t like my sister; I never was. I don’t mind work.” I saw by her
shadow that she glanced around her little flat, spotless in its
neatness. “If it wasn’t that folks look down on you for working, I’d
like to keep my job till I die.”
“Why don’t you talk to the man as you have to me?” I asked.
“What for?” she cried, startled.
“Sifted down to fundamentals, marriage is a partnership, entered in for
the purpose of founding and supporting a home and rearing children,” I
told her. “If you were to tell your manager that every time he came
around you felt like jumping out the window, I think he would look
elsewhere for a forewoman. You have been honest with yourself, I want
you to be honest with the man who has asked you to go into partnership
with him.”
I’ve had girls by the dozen tell me:
“I’m a lady now. I’m married and don’t work.”
And I’ve heard dozens of my fellow workers remark on seeing a former
working-mate:
“Ain’t she lucky! She hadn’t been workin’ no time hardly before she
married.”
In no instance did the speaker mean that the woman referred to did not
work at home—only that she did not work for wages. She might slave, do
anything and everything at home, but so long as she did not work for
wages she was in a higher class—a lady.
So besides demanding a larger share of capital accruing from their work,
Labor is demanding that the stigma be taken off work. As I see it there
is but one way to accomplish this—for every woman as well as every man
to be, or to have been, a wage-earner.